Good old Abdullah. He really is a moderate. Why, he is calling on the region's nuclear power to be disarmed! How courageous of him to stand up to Iran!
What's that? He meant Israel, not Iran? He said it wasn't fair for Israel to have nukes if Iran didn't? Despite the fact that Israel has no bellicose intentions toward Iran, but the Iranian President has loudly and repeatedly proclaimed his desire to destroy Israel? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?
"Jordanian King Calls on World to Disarm Israel’s Alleged Nukes," from Israel National News, with thanks to Romy:
(IsraelNN.com) Jordan’s King Abdullah has called on the world to require Israel to disarm its nuclear weapons. He said it was not fair to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, while Israel is armed with such weapons.Israel has persistently refused to acknowledge that it has any nuclear weapons.
Abdullah said a precondition for peace in the region is for “Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.”
Sure. Peace will be easy then. Israel will be obliterated, and peace will come at last.
Another new story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/4938302.stm
Wait for "he had become very religious".
YoJimbo, and what makes you think that the eye-witness reports of seeing Asian looking people being driven away in police cars aren't just undercover policemen and women just going about there daily tasks in the backs of police cars? Tut.. You rascist bigots are all alike.
Slightly OT, but I thought a lot of readers might be interested. The following is courtesy of Rick Richman who recently wrote the following on his Jewish Current Issues blogsite in response to British Jewish historian Tony Judt's defence (published in the New York Times) of the Walt/Mearshimer paper on the supposedly nefarious
effect of the "Israel Lobby" on US foreign policy.
Bear in mind as you read, that JFK's comments on the myth of Israel being the destabilizing force in the Middle East, were made in 1959.
Response to Tony Judt
Before he became president, John F. Kennedy visited Palestine and Israel twice -- once in 1939 and again in 1951. He wrote about the trips in his 1960 collection of speeches entitled "The Strategy of Peace."
"In 1939 I first saw Palestine, then an unhappy land under alien rule, and to a large extent then a barren land. . . . In 1951, I traveled
again to the land by the River Jordan, to see firsthand the new State of Israel. The transformation that had taken place was hard to believe."
"For in those twelve years, a nation had been born, a desert had been reclaimed, and the most tragic victims of World War II . . . had found a
home."
Kennedy used that recollection to introduce his February 9, 1959 speech to the Golden Jubilee Banquet of B'nai Zion in New York City. Future historians should consult it to assist in deciphering what is not self-evident to Tony
Judt:
"[O]ur own history as a nation and Israel's have many parallels -- in the diversity of their origins, in their capacity to reach the unattainable, in the receptivity to new ideas and social experimentation. . . .
"History records several [] breakthroughs -- great efforts to which spiritual conviction and human endurance have combined to make realities out of prophecies. The Puritans in Massachusetts, the Mormons in Salt Lake City,the Scotch-Irish in the Western territories were all imbued with the truth of the old Jewish thought that a people can have only as much sky over its head as it has land under its feet. . . .
"I would like to . . . dispel a prevalent myth . . . the assertion that it is Zionism which has been the unsettling and fevered infection in
the Middle East, the belief that without Israel there would somehow be a natural harmony throughout the Middle East and Arab world. Quite apart from the values and hopes which the State of Israel enshrines . . . it twists
reality to suggest that it is the democratic tendency of Israel which has injected discord and dissension into the Near East. Even by the coldest
calculations, the removal of Israel would not alter the basic crisis in the area. . . . The basic rivalries within the Arab world, the quarrels over boundaries, the tensions involved in lifting their economies from stagnation, the cross pressures of nationalism -- all of these factors would still be there, even if there were no Israel. . . .
"Israel, on the other hand, embodying all the characteristics of a Western democracy and having long passed the threshold of economic development, shares with the West a tradition of civil liberties, of cultural freedom, of parliamentary democracy, of social mobility. . . .
"The choice today is not between either the Arab states or Israel. Ways must be found of supporting the legitimate aspirations of each. The
United States, whose President was first to recognize the new State of Israel, need have no apologies - indeed should pride itself - for the action it took. . . .
"The Jewish state found its fulfillment during a time when it bore witness, to use the words of Markham, to humanity betrayed, "plundered,
profaned, and disinherited."
"But it is yet possible that history will record this event as only the prelude to the betterment and therapy, not merely of a strip of land,
but of a broad expanse of almost continental dimensions. . . . [A]s we observe the inspiring experience of Israel, we know that we must make the effort .
"Good old Abdullah. He really is a moderate. Why, he is calling on the region's nuclear power to be disarmed! How courageous of him to stand up to Iran!
What's that? He meant Israel, not Iran? He said it wasn't fair for Israel to have nukes if Iran didn't? Despite the fact that Israel has no bellicose intentions toward Iran, but the Iranian President has loudly and repeatedly proclaimed his desire to destroy Israel? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?
"Jordanian King Calls on World to Disarm Israel’s Alleged Nukes," from Israel National News, with thanks to Romy:
(IsraelNN.com) Jordan’s King Abdullah has called on the world to require Israel to disarm its nuclear weapons. He said it was not fair to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, while Israel is armed with such weapons.
Israel has persistently refused to acknowledge that it has any nuclear weapons.
Abdullah said a precondition for peace in the region is for “Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.”
Sure. Peace will be easy then. Israel will be obliterated, and peace will come at last. "
Frankly, I am not suprised about the King of Jordan asking the world to disarm Isreal. The reason being is that if he asks Iran not to pursue the course of nuclear arming, since he has to deal with next door Palistine and Hamas, they could end up threatening his life or that of his family if he speaks out against them. Dealing with Iran and Hamas is like dealing with the mafia. So this is why he would rather deal with Isreal. Isreal is the world's favorite whiping post.
Abdullah really is a moderate. Probably a lot more like Abu Mazen and Mahmud al-Zahar than Americans realize. As for Tony Judt, he demonstrates once again that many of the so-called intellectuals, including historians who ought to know better, not entirely sane. It's not even a matter of conscious deceit, but of sanity in some cases. I consider Mearsheimer and Walt to be deliberately deceiving with their paper. On the other hand, Judt and Juan Cole seem to really believe what Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, although it can be demonstrably be proven false quite easily. Hence, Judt and Cole should not be considered sane. Sane and well-informed people today, in or out of the academy, need to be skeptical of the specialists who in all too many cases are working for interests extraneous to scholarship [that cannot be acknowledged] or are very loosely wrapped and incapable of telling truth from falsehood.
Israel can't disarm themselves. They have too many around them who want them annilhated.
Abdullah might as well ask them to lie down and die.
Israel of course, survives only because it possesses nuclear weapons. Given the vast asymmetries in population, in size, in resources (Israel doesn't have those trillions coming in from an accident of geology; Israelis have to work for a living) between Israel and the Arab camp, Israel and the Muslim camp, any call for Israel to give up nuclear weapons is a call for Israel to commit suicide.
Abdullah, thick-necked former wrestler that he is, has not the sheen or appeal of his father, the King Hussein whose deep voice and sincere look so entranced Prince Charles and Anthony Lewis as the "plucky little king." (But Alan Clarke, the almost-tell-all cabinet minister under Thatcher who described King Hussein as the "oily little king"), and he cannot quite offer the same nonsense with the same panache. Furthermore, as more people learn about the history of Jordan (not to mention those opinon polls that reveal that the Eastern Palestinians of Eastern Palestine, and the Western Palestinians now in Eastern Palestine, are full of admiration for Al Qaeda and full of loathing for the United States).
What this child or rather great-grandchild of the Hejaz fails to realize that the only reason he is still sitting on the throne of that British concoction, the Arab Kingdom of Jordan, ne The Emirate of Transjordan, is because the Israelis have prevented, in the past, and might just do so again, any attempts to topple that monarchy. He should remember who is against him, and who, while not exactly "for" him, help to keep him alive. If somehow others attempted to deprive Israel of its major weaponry, thus leaving it vulnerable not merely to defeat, but to the total annihilation of the state and of everyone in it (for that is what would happen), it would be impossible for this kind of thing to happen without an overturning of the monarchy in Jordan.
Abdullah's father, the plucky little king,having been badly burned when he listened to Nasser and, against his own better judgment, entered the 1967 war (remember that famous telephone call between Nasser and Hussein? And remember the order of smiling plucky little King Hussein, to his troops in June 1967, to "kill the Jews wherever you find them," was forever after determined not to carry any more water in good Gunga Din fashion for the relentless Arab Jihad against Israel. King Hussein liked his pleasures; the call girls who paid visits, seriatim, to his hotel suites, their bills paid for through the generosity of American taxpayers (but unbeknownst to them, for the CIA signed the chits and neglected to inform those American taxpayers). He liked being a king, and flying his own plane, and driving his own fast cars. It was fun. And, having lived and ruled for a very long time, he was sufficiently acute to understand that he needed Israel in order to survive --- that Israel was no threat to him, but Nasser's folly, Syria's aggression, Black September, and all sorts of "Palestinian" groups, were a threat.
That was knowledge acquired painfully, over decades. Apparently the lesson has to be re-learned by his outwardly amiable, somewhat thick-headed son. Which just goes to show that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. One more bit of evidence that Lamarck was wrong.
I don't know what course Jordan will take. In the past, it has foolishly followed Nesser of Egypt to attack Israel, and lost the West Bank as a result (and also East Jerusalem). This Hasemite Kingdom has also help made the Palestinian refugee problem worse.
It is also one of the Islamic nations that is missing in the list of those other Islamic nations that Ezekiel prophesied and said that will attack Israel in the future (Ezek 38:2-6). Dan 11:41 says that Jordan will be spared. Another nation is also conspicuously missing from the list: Egypt. But Dan 11:42 says that Egypt will be invaded by a coming king (reference to the anti-Christ aka al-Mahdi) and will be sudued.
Interestingly, Jordan and Egypt are the two Muslim nations surrounding Israel that currently have a peace treaty with Israel.
Kind Hussein, direct descendant of Mohammed, was a graduate of Sandhurst. The former defence secretary, Lord Carrington, once said, "Sandhurst produces one half of the future leaders of the Third World and the London School of Economics the other half, although I think the former does a better job."
The king liked speed, cars, helicopters. It is said he watched James Bond films hundreds of time over. Incidentally, Ian Fleming was also a cadet of Sandhurst.
Apparently, the late king was a fan of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. And before his death from cancer, the Jordanian monarch, who had lost his hair from radiation treatments, took great delight in doing imitations of Dr. Evil, the bald arch-nemesis played by Myers in Austin Powers. (Cryogenically frozen in the '60s, and defrosted in the '90s, Dr. Evil becomes a laughing stock among world leaders when he threatens to annihilate the planet unless he receives a ransom of "one million dollars.") Hussein "would do Dr. Evil all the time," according to Myers: "Evidently, he went to a meeting at the Pentagon and he turned to people and said, 'Gentlemen, I would like 20 F-16s - and one million dollars!'"
-Denver
The last time I was in Scotland, I think I saw the top of one's head for an instant as he surfaced in the middle of a certain lake.
The Loch Ness Mahdi?
Abdullah knows Israel is not going to disarm and that his words are meaningless. He is just playing to local sentiment. I woudn't be surprised if he didn't call Olmert and warn him that the statement was coming.
Compared to 98% of the world's muslims he is a true moderate. He even remarked to a group of Jordanian Christians while talking about his mother, "I guess you can say I'm half-Christian myself".
The Western powers big mistake was missing the opportunity to give the Caliphate to a Hashemite after Ataturk deposed the Ottomans.
Slop for the local hogs, not meant for human consumption.
Now the "king" can go back to watching re-runs of "The Great Escape" motorcycle jumping-the-wire scene, again and again, and wishing he weren't trapped in the iron spiderweb of Islam. Just as Steve McQueen's character in the film ends up enmeshed in Nazi barbed wire... seconds from freedom... inches from libery... caught in fate's humorless meshes.... over and over...
Be glad you aren't forced to play such a palace farce, with the lines:
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace, from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time..." taunting you at every turn.
Not even a tragically-resisting Prince Hamlet, but a merely-thrashing pretender Macbeth.
(Maybe the Israelis could just give him one little nuke, and make everybody happy?)
"Maybe the Israelis could just give him one little nuke, and make everybody happy?"
He'd probably want to use it on his own parliament.